I finally made it to Pere Lachaise today, and Proust was my #1 dead person I had to visit. The map I found online turned out to be wildly unspecific (right quadrant, wrong position for EVERYONE), but I ran into a nice lady who offered me help and steered me right to him.
Alas, I never did find Sarah Bernhardt, but I also said hi to Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. The latter is so rowdy they‘ve got metal event barriers around him.
I had to add this to my collection. Many books on French writers don‘t include very many women writers. They usually have Marie de France, Madame de La fayette , sometimes Simone de Beauvoir and George Sand and that‘s it.
so-soI‘ve always been intimidated by Proust and was thrilled to read this one with a few others. Proust has a meandering way of exploring the world around him. He‘s not rushed and his sentences are long and indulgent. That can feel exhausting at times, but then you come across a line so beautiful and achingly relatable that it stops you in your tracks. I‘m not ready to tackle the rest of the series, but maybe one book a year would be the right speed.
Sarah @HardcoverHearts and I are buddy reading Emile Zola‘s Rougon Maquart series in publication order. Starting no. 9 today: Pot Luck.
“It‘s most direct successor in modern French literature may be Baudelaire‘s post-romantic” Fleurs du mal”. It was only a few years after “The Regrets” that the wars of religion between varying factions of Protestants and Catholics (1562-98) profoundly changed French culture and set the stage for the more highly structured and often less personal literature of the 17th century”.
Reading Barzakh, a fantasy/SF novel by Mauritanian author Moussa Ould Ebnou. Doing a bit of research on Aoudaghost/Awdaghost, a city lost to the desert in the Middle-Ages, and on the Sahel region is helping a lot w/ timeline & geography.
Pic by Luca Abbate from https://wildmanlife.com/aoudaghost-economic-hub-of-the-sahara/ This page contains pics & detailed info & matches quite closely the descriptions in the book. Useful.
#Mauritania
pickThis was a cute series of short stories and excerpts in relation to Colette‘s French bull dog and cat and various other animals throughout the book. She was a French novelist who wrote the Real Claudine series and Gigi. She has an amazing descriptive style, especially as this was in the first person in the animals perspective throughout the book. I picked this up at a used bookstore on my travels to San Francisco.
